From the article:
"Either way, the machine takes hours to recover from each experiment. The fact that NIF is able to do this once per day is a technical achievement that took years to perfect. Making it happen 10,000 times faster is absurdly difficult. "

"...the world’s entire supply of tritium is something like 50 pounds. In 2020, the market cost of tritium was nearly $1 million per ounce. Livermore scientists estimate that a commercial operation modeled on NIF would require two pounds per day."

Why these hacks feel the need to issue bullshit press releases should be investigated. Numerous other fusion devices are much closer to functional fusion than this obsolete slide rule. Assholes. And the media are science idiots.

We'll see cold fusion before NIF achieves real break-even!
Tritium has an 11 year half-life making it an extremely hazardous isotope and equipment contaminant.

What IS interesting is why fusion works, which is that the rest mass of the products is less than the rest mass of the starting materials by a tiny, tiny bit. But when you multiply that tiny difference times the speed of light squared, it's a lot of energy.